So a few days ago was my birthday (and thanks so much for all of the amazing birthday wishes I received). There was something extra sweet about being so far away but still getting lots of messages. To be honest, other than receiving some random presents (not complaining, I love my kitty socks), it didn’t really seem much like a birthday. I had to work, of course, though my classes were pretty chill.. and when I say chill I mean me throwing a football down a hallway and enjoying watching the kids scramble to get it. The Chinese don’t place a lot of emphasis on birthdays. Whenever you ask a student what they will do for their birthday, they always say, “eat cake”. They don’t get presents or even have parties. That’s right, Mom and Dad, had you brought us up in China you wouldn’t have had to shell out the megabucks for Chuck E Cheese. Though, if you had brought us up in China I most likely wouldn’t exist..I like to think a little celebration once a year is worth it to have me in your life!
Random Chinese birthday facts:
In China, when you are born, you are one year old. Which means all of you out there, clinging to age 49, thanking the stars that you aren’t 50, sorry! In China, you are 50! (It is actually more complicated than that, it goes by the lunar calendar and such; sometimes you are a year older than we think you are and sometimes you aren’t.) This makes things very complicated at school sometimes. The minimum age of students we are supposed to teach is 3. So in come these babies that don’t even understand the minutest amount of Chinese, and the sales staff says “They are almost 3!”. Nope, not at all. That baby is one and a half.
The Chinese sing the Birthday Song differently. Despite the fact that about 85% of Hohhot does not speak English, I have yet to come across someone that does not know the Birthday Song in English*. However, they song;
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you”.


*-See post: English Words Every Chinese Person Knows

Lesson Plan for the Teens
This is a lesson plan on materials (plastic, metal, etc) for a class of 12-14 year olds. These lessons are 2 hours long. Pretty much everyone hates teaching them, because they are so long. However, it kind of works out because since the students will do activities for a longer period of time than the little kids will. With the babies, you can only play a game for 5 minutes, and then they lose focus.
1. Check attendance and homework (noticing a pattern yet?)
2. Introduce vocabulary- gather students around the computer and bring up pictures of the words, students write the Chinese translation in their book. The teenagers don’t really care about flashcards, and I like to make sure they get the correct translation (I don’t have a Chinese teacher in the classroom with me). This sometimes takes 20 minutes, because something we see online invariably sidetracks us.
3. Give the students a sentence structure, and have them plug their own words in- A ___ is made of ___.
4. Scavenger hunt- students go around the school and find different materials, write the down then share with the class.
5. Invention- students have to create something new using the materials listed in the book (just draw a picture and describe it, I wish we had the resources to attempt to make things).
6. Complete a page (or 2) of bookwork.
7. Paper airplane tournament- students make a paper airplane. They say a sentence or answer a question, and get to try to throw their airplane into the trash can. If the get it in, the go to the next round, where the throwing line is farther back, and so on.
8. Listening (out of book).
9. Discussion- Quality of materials, where you should buy certain things, etc.
10. Worksheet on a grammar structure
11. Football throwing game- kids throw ball back and forth to each other, first to drop is out and answers questions.
12. Review sheet (like the ones the kids do, but I don’t comment on their behavior unless they are really bad.)

This is a lesson plan on food for a class of 7-9 year olds. The classes are an hour and 20 minutes long.
1. Check homework and attendance.
2. Introduce vocabulary words- have them shout and use in sentences; I like, I don’t like.
3. Race- One student from each team crab walks to the board, and says what the flashcard is. First one to finish gets the point.
4. Throw ball around, having the student who throws the ball asking “What do you like to eat?” and the student who catches it responds.
5. Throw all the flashcards onto the floor. Turn off the lights, and the students have 5 seconds to get a flashcard and sit back down. (This game only works at night, otherwise they can see). The student must say “I have a…” and whatever their flashcard is. If they didn’t pick up a card, or if they say the wrong word, tickle them or bounce the ball on their head.
6. Complete a page of bookwork.
7. Hangman with a sentence.
8. Put the class in two teams, and give each student a number (and someone else on the other team has the same number). Put them in two lines, with some distance in between. Put the flashcards in the middle. Yell out a number and a food, for example 3, banana, and the students have the number 3 have to race to get the banana.
9. Complete review sheet- students write down all the words and sentences they learned that day, as well as their homework, then I leave a comment about their behavior for the class.

Thought is might be interesting to explain how we teach to the different levels. Here is a basic lesson plan for one of my classes of 4-6 year olds (I’m assuming no EF competitors are going to take this and sell it..). This is an hour class, teaching animals.
1) Check attendance, homework, and sing the Hello Song:
“EF Small Star kids, hello everyone! We are here to learn and play, hello everyone!”
2) Show flashcards of animals, and elicit responses
3) Shouting match- show students card, team to say the word the loudest, quietest, happiest, saddest, weirdest, etc gets a point.
4) Freeze dance- play music, students dance around to music, when the music stops they shout the animal name and then pretend to be an animal.
5) Telephone- Whisper animal in one students ear, they whisper it to the next student, so on.. Last student picks the corresponding flashcard.
6) Limbo- hold a string across the room, students go under it. If they touch the string they have to say an animal.
7) Pass out HW, give good students smiley faces on their papers. Sing Goodbye song:
“Goodbye friends, goodbye friends, we’ll have fun another day. I’ll see you soon and we can play again, but for now I’m going home”.

I realized that most of my posts are about the differences between the Chinese and us, or about things that happen at school. Here is some things we do outside school.
During the non-busy times (Spring and Fall) we have two days off a week. This usually means that one day is spent in bed, nursing the effects of the local bar. The other day, though, we try to get out of the house and do things. If we want to go shopping, we have two main options. Wanda is a new shopping mall, complete with some western stores (albeit lesser known in America), an arcade, and a nice cinema that supplies us with our western movie fix when needed. The mall is also home to a great supermarket, so when we leave we are always laden with bags, even if we didn’t buy any clothes. The clothes are more expensive there, but better quality and more in the western fashion. Our other option is to go to Manda (the rhyming is completely coincidental) which is a huge market of all things clothes, accessories, and whatever your heart desires. Bargaining is expected, so I only go there when I have lots of energy. The problem with the clothes, though, is that they are in Chinese fashion, and some of them are reallllly strange. Women my age and older can regularly be seen walking around with shirts with bunnies or kitties on them, short shorts and 3 layers of leggings, and thigh high boots. I’ve chatted with some Chinese friends about this, but I don’t think I will ever truly understand. They like frilly and girly things because it makes them feel younger. Chinese women do not show their chests like we do. Shirts usually have high necks, and more commonly loose. However, they love to show their legs. They usually aren’t entirely bare, wearing leggings or tights, but they wear some booty shorts that would make a nun cry. I’ve seen women that are at least in their 50’s wear super short skirts, tights, and 4 inch heels-when it was snowing out! But I digress from my topic. Manda caters to these styles, so I rarely go there if I am looking for clothes, though I have found some amazing shoes and jewelry for dirt-cheap.
Another popular day-off trip spot is the DVD store. I’m sure I have written about it before, but this place is just heaven in Hohhot. Whenever a new teacher comes, one of the first places we take them is the DVD store, and we just watch ‘em go crazy. It is not rare for one of us to walk out with 10 DVDs or more. Additionally, they have an employee that speaks English, so if there is a movie we want that they don’t have, they can try to order it for us.
The Culture Market is another hot spot. I don’t know why it is called that, but it’s a great place to buy odds and ends. That’s where the boys stock up on their video games, and I have purchased random things from Christmas wrapping paper to flower seeds.
Recently, I spent a day off climbing a mountain. Hohhot is surrounded partly by a mountain range, which is accessible by a 45-minute bike ride out of the city. This journey takes you through some of the older areas of the city, which is quite the adventure in itself. To get up the mountain, we first must hide our bikes in a cemetery at the foot of one of the smaller mountains. This sounds morbid, yes, but cemeteries are quite different than here (I will do a separate post about them). We then begin the trek up to the top of the range. Now, two weeks ago was the first time I actually attempted to climb a mountain, so to me it was quite a feat. The trail we followed weaved over and around huge boulders, and right on the edge of steep drop-offs. The view from the top, though, was entirely worth all the aches and pains from the hike up. There’s nothing like sitting on top of a mountain and eating a mini cheesecake!
Other places we visit include some local parks, and of course a few restaurants that know what we are going to order the minute we walk in because we go there so much. Soon I will be venturing out to visit the museum and temples of the city, and will post information on those when I do. I am a little ashamed because I haven’t visited the main tourist attractions yet, and I have been here for 9 months, but hey, better late than never!

This isn’t the happiest topic out there, so I’ll make it short and efficient (I also think I have touched upon this before). China doesn’t have cemeteries dotting their cities like we do. The traditional method is to take the deceased outside the city, and bury them in any old plot of land. In some areas, where many people have been buried near each other, they (and I have no idea who “they” is) put up a fence to make the area more sacred. In this respect, it is a cemetery. However, anyone can access it easily enough, and through it can have access to the rest of the mountain. One of the more interesting things, though, is that in the mountains you come across holes that are, most likely, pre-dug graves (which is pretty morbid). According to some Chinese I spoken to, though, most people today opt to be cremated, so as not to waste any precious land or money.

Movies and TV shows are a very interesting part of the Chinese life. I’m dividing this into several sections because there are lots of things to explain.

Movies in the Cinema
There is no movie rating system in China, unlike the rigid G/PG/R system of America. The powers that be screen a movie, and if they think it is appropriate for the general masses to see, then it goes to the theaters. Only a certain number of foreign movies are allowed in a cinema per year. Sometimes, a movie will show in theaters for a week or two, and then be taken out for no apparent reason. When we have asked why this happens, a possible answer is that they realized it was really ok for everyone to watch, or that it wasn’t popular and they didn’t want to waste one of their few slots for foreign movies on it.

Movies on the Internet
We have been able to find tons of popular movies on Chinese websites like youku.com, which is just their version of youtube.com. Sometimes they have Chinese subtitles, which is great for showing kids in class, and sometimes they are cam copies with Arabic dubbing (haven’t figured why it’s in Arabic..). One of the most common issues when trying to find a video is that the title had been translated into crazy Chinglish. For example, the new version of The Karate Kid is on the Internet as “Kung Fu Dreams”. The titles of movies are translated into Chinese as best as possible, but when they translate them back to English it creates a new translation. We have found that the best way to find a movie online is to try to find the Chinese translation and look it up that way. When all else fails, we ask for help from a Chinese person!

TV Shows on the Internet
When I came to China, I was worried that I would be unable to watch my favorite TV shows. Turns out I had nothing to worry about. I have been able to find almost every episode of all the series I like to watch back online on one website or another. Usually I have to deal with Chinese subtitles blocking part of the scene, but I’ve gotten quite used to then. One particular website has people uploading the episodes of the series in order, soon after they show in the US. I am considering continuing to use said websites when I get back home to the States, I’m getting spoiled without having to wait for commercials!

Movies and TV Shows in the Stores
Here we come to the most interesting section of all (to me at least). Only a month or two after most movies come out in the States, we can buy decent, if not very nice BluRay versions of movies. Same with TV shows, as soon as the season is finished, it is for sale. There are two copies available of most movies, one being a cheaper decent copy, the second being an actual copy in a box like we purchase in America. But why pay 28 yuan for the box, when you can buy a good copy for 10 yuan? The we come to the whole legality thing. If you try to mail a DVD from China to the west, they will tell you no. If you try to carry a DVD onto a plane out of China, they will tell you no again. Originally, we thought this was because they were illegal copies. Recently, though, I learned the (most likely*) truth behind it. Distribution of movies in China is controlled by their Army. The Army buys the film distribution rights for China, and then sells them at cheap prices. You know when you watch a movie, and the Federal Warning says “This movie is for private viewing only”? Well the videos sold here are for “Viewing in China only” which is why they don’t want them sent out of the country, but also why they can sell movies on the side of the street without and repercussions. Now, does this mean I cannot take home the approximately 150 movies I have purchased since I have been here? Nope, just gotta put em in my checked baggage among my American bought movies, and I should be as good as gold.

*Why most likely: This reasoning has been researched by one of the teachers who has lived here for 4 years and is married to a Chinese woman. However, there is still a possibility of some error in translation.